MOVIE REVIEW: Mesmerising tale of outback injustice

SET in the Northern Territory in the 1920s, this frontier western might be viewed as a companion piece to director Warwick Thornton's award-winning 2009 feature film debut, Samson & Delilah, which featured a contemporary indigenous couple.

While the period drama is more conventionally structured than its groundbreaking predecessor, it packs a similarly hefty emotional wallop.

And the ending ripples out across the decades, all the way to recent events at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.

According the film's promotional material, Sweet Country puts justice itself on trial.

But while there is a makeshift, outdoor hearing - there is no church in this godforsaken town and Matt Day's boyish judge refuses to hold proceedings in the local bar - this is no courtroom drama.

It's the characters' actions that hold them accountable.

For the most part, the whitefella roles are uncomfortably familiar (not to mention the actors who play them).

Sam Neill is Fred Smith, a bumbling but essentially decent preacher who ekes out a living on a hardscrabble plot of land with stockman Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), his wife Lizzie (Natassia Gorey-Furber) and her niece.

Trouble soon arrives in the form of war veteran Harry March (Ewen Leslie), a particularly nasty piece of work.

Against his better instincts, Smith "lends" Sam and Lizzie to his new neighbour because it's the Christian thing to do.

March rapes Lizzie and humiliates Kelly.

A few days later, in pursuit of a runaway teenage employee (jointly played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan), March confronts Kelly with a rifle.

The expert bushman shoots him in self defence.

Knowing there is no justice in Australia for a blackfella who shoots a white man, no matter what the circumstances, Kelly and Lizzie go on the run.

Bryan Brown's hardman sergeant pursues them with a zealousness that tips over into obsession.